New Research Highlights A Digital Literacy Gap–Here’s How To Bridge It

On April 10 and 11 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat in the Congressional hot seat facing hours of questioning about his business model, Russian malefactors and violations of privacy. While much remains to be discussed, defined and declared one thing was ringingly clear: Congress has a lot to learn about the digital world.

Now, to be fair, there were notable exceptions, with some representatives posing sharp questions right on the money. But sadly, we also saw many elected officials display a woeful unfamiliarity with some of the most fundamental concepts underpinning the digital economy. Needless to say, it’s a little unsettling to think that regulation of the Internet sits in these groping hands.

To find out more about the competency gap and what companies can do about it, I spoke with one of the study’s authors, Kieran Luke, General Manager of Credentials at General Assembly.

Peter Horst: What prompted you to look at the digital skills gap to begin with?

Kieran Luke: It started a few years ago when speaking with one of our clients, who said, “We know digital change is coming and we need to get ahead of it. How can we figure out where our people are in their skill set?” So we started with a variety of different assessments, refined them over time and arrived at a Digital Marketing Level 1 Assessment. We also put established companies and younger, digitally native companies through the assessment to compare the digital skills of people who do it every day versus more traditional brand and channel managers. Over time it grew to the point where we had 10,000 people having gone through it, from Fortune 500s to start-ups.

Horst: At which point you realized you had a treasure trove of data on the state of digital literacy in the marketplace.

Luke: Exactly. We looked at this body of insights to see what we could learn about where people struggled most often. The first question was whether there was in fact a skills gap between native digital and traditional marketers. Not surprisingly, the answer was yes, a dramatic 73% gap. We saw two main drivers of this difference. The first challenge was math—simply calculating the numbers correctly. Traditional marketers had more trouble getting all the discrete steps in the marketing funnel, and got numerators and denominators wrong. They understood the broad brush but not the individual elements and dynamics of the funnel. The second broad challenge was technical literacy. Traditional marketers could relate to channels they’d used before, and they could handle the generic tasks like setting up a campaign. But they struggled with anything more technical: attribution models, programmatic advertising, technical terms for portions of an email. When it came to technical non-layman terms, people really struggled.

General Assembly

Digital Marketing Level 1 Scores

Horst: What other insights jumped out at a high level?

Luke: Another interesting finding was that we had people taking this assessment from a wide variety of functions beyond marketing. And it turns out high scorers can come from every discipline—sales, general management, public relations, etc. This tells you that these skills are learnable, and it lets you be more expansive in terms of how you source digital marketing roles. We also looked at cuts by seniority—and it turns out you can be senior or junior and still score well. These are new skills, so there isn’t any built-in advantage to being experienced. Now, the very senior people outscored everyone, but from director-level on down the skill levels were indistinguishable.

Horst: It’s interesting that the senior-most scored the best. You might be inclined to think they’re the dinosaurs who just don’t get it.

Luke: It is interesting—perhaps a reflection that the more senior, more successful people are more active in keeping up with developments in the industry, and perhaps a reflection of pure intellectual capacity that has helped them rise in the organization.

Horst: Based on what you saw in the analysis, what can organizations do to address the digital literacy gap?

Luke: The recommendations are really pretty straightforward and fall into four buckets:

Channels. Every company has a set of channels they depend on. You can’t take for granted that people understand the technical fundamentals of how every channel works, how it functions. You need to give them the basic technical understanding of the channels that are relevant to the business.

Silos. There are organizational silos that separate the data/martech teams from the marketing leaders that consume the data. You need to build stronger collaboration between the provider and the customer to reinforce the understanding of the issues and the available resources.

Hiring. You can’t assume everyone knows their stuff, so make sure you understand their skills on the way in. You also can’t assume that these skills live only in marketing professionals—they can come from every function and every level. So by expanding how hiring departments think about sourcing candidates, you create new pathways of opportunity for people who don’t typically come in through traditional career paths and hiring models. And since this in turn lowers hiring bias and increases diversity within the candidate pool, you ultimately have better-quality candidates to choose from.

Marketing strategies to help your team get inspired to make bold moves. Join me.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Get Tips On How To Inspire Your Marketing Team

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription.

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

Email Address

Consulting

Peter leverages his decades of experience in building businesses across diverse industries to provide advisory services to senior executives and their teams through his consultancy CMO Inc. He consults in the areas of brand strategy, positioning, marketing plan development, innovation, marketing organizational strategy, and campaign development.

Routinely one of the highest-rated keynoters at conferences around the world, Peter brings humor, authenticity, and compelling content to his engagements. Peter is equally comfortable speaking to international CMO forums, technology conferences, and in-house corporate events.